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Five Tips For Writing a Speech

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Five Tips To Keep In Mind When Writing Your Wedding Speech

Being asked to do a speech at someone’s wedding is both an honour and yet one of the most stressful experiences for a lot of people.

If you’re stressed about whether it’s funny enough or if it’s too boring, you may end up with writers block and not be able to articulate, which can be a nerve-wracking time for anyone.

It doesn’t have to be that way though! So whether you need best man, grooms or father of the bride speech tips or just general advice about wedding speeches, here are five helpful hints and tips for preparing yours

1. Open with a joke

Opening with a joke is sure to break the ice, get the audience interested and help calm your nerves. If you’re having fun, the crowd will be having fun and everyone else will be relaxed within your presence making it easier on you in the long-run. Although in saying this, make sure that this is the only joke and that you’re not about to turn this into a five minute, stand-up comedy routine that only goes in favour of yourself. Starting with a joke, maybe even bringing the joke back around at the end is a sure-fire way to make your speech less boring and also, the most important thing, highly memorable.

2. Tell an entertaining anecdote about the person in question

Following on from the joke, make sure to include some interesting anecdotes from over the time that you’ve known this person. Story-telling is one of the easiest ways to keep an audience entertained, so the more humorous and outrageous, the better! So if you met this person at an outrageous fancy dress party where they were terrible at karaoke, don’t be afraid to embarrass them in front of everyone. Just be warned, it might come back to bite you when it’s your turn!

3. Keep it short, but not too brief

A long-winded speech can end up boring your audience, so 3-6 minutes for a wedding speech is more than ample. A best man’s speech will vary in length from the groom’s speech for example, but with practise, you should be able to feel what works for you. A shorter speech will be straight to the point and your audience will most certainly be kept captivated throughout. Just don’t scrimp on it because people will be able to tell!

4. Remember that every story must have a beginning, middle and an end

Structure is very important when writing a speech, so it’s always helpful to keep this in mind. To begin your speech, you will want to introduce yourself before anything else as there’s nothing worse than not knowing who on Earth is talking! Then, you can start to tell your story to fill the middle with interesting anecdotes and stories about the person you’re talking about. Then to finish up, you can toast to the person in question and ask everyone to raise their glass to honour the couple getting married.

5. Practice makes perfect!

Practice, practice and more practice is exactly what you need to deliver the best speech. You may think that it could be a total waste of time, but the more you practice it, literally whenever you can, the more it will sink in and you will be able to feel your words. So whether you’re going to practise to your dog, your best mate or even the mirror (not as silly as it sounds!) your speech will be far better for it at the end of the day.

It’s easy to tell when people’s words are not heartfelt, so you’ll be able to work on this through practice. Plus if there are any minor changes that you need to make to your speech, you will have already found them through saying them out loud.

So there you have it! If you need speech ideas to get you started, from a groom speech to a wedding speech template, look no further than here. Do you agree with these wedding speech tips or have any others to add that you’ve used previously? Feel free to let us know! Good luck!

New Drinks Package for Events

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Time to be Inspired

Continuing from my recent New Year, New Lillibrooke theme, I’ve been swatting up on the new packages we’re offering this year – new drinks packages, new menus on the way, special offers on venue hire!

Our fab head chef, James, has been working hard on the new menus, which should be ready soon. The new dishes sound delicious and everyone in the office is very much looking forward to doing the all-important taste test! The new menus will be ready to go live soon and the drinks packages to compliment them are looking fab too. A well-chosen drinks package can make all the difference to the enjoyment of a meal, and when the food is as good as it is at Lillibrooke, it can make your wedding or event really stand out!

Wood’s Wines are offering us ever better choices to pass on to our clients, so we now have a variety of great packages for any budget and you can pick and choose the one that suits you the best. The new packages cover more than just wines and range in price, offering flexibility for your event. You can combine a gin bar reception with some of our new and very exciting canape and shot combos – they are a brand new and brilliant way to set your drink reception totally apart from others! They’re still being finalised, so I won’t give too much away yet, but suffice to say that they are inspired and sound mouth-wateringly tasty! As I say, these are only in the test stages (and again, we’re very much looking forward to the testing), so watch this space because exciting things are afoot in the Lillibrooke kitchens!

At Lillibrooke, we appreciate good food, good wine and good service and enjoy sharing it with our clients, so whether you’re after a crisp, dry Sauvignon Blanc, an oak-aged Rioja, or some of our new canape and shot combos to tie in with a scrumptious menu, our great selection of packages can be perfectly matched to any desire in any season!

Alys Hilbourne - Blogger & Events Manager

Having worked in London for most of her career, Alys discovered & fell in love with Lillibrooke Manor in 2012 and has never looked back, delivering hundreds of events and ensuring that each one is special and perfect in every way

Latest from the Kitchen- Canape & Shot Combos

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Time to be Inspired

There has been much excitement in the office this week with the arrival of the new canape and shot combos that our fab head chef, James, has been dreaming up over the last few weeks! They’ve had a great time in the kitchen testing them out and the best ones were previewed at this week’s team meeting, much to our delight!! They look amazing and taste delicious. We had to sit through most of the meeting, staring at them in the middle of the table before being allowed to have a taste at the end of the meeting. It was well worth the wait. There are rainbow coloured skittle vodkas, paired with watermelon vodka jellies – they look like a little taste of summer, and on a dreary drizzly day in February, they brought a ray of sunshine into our team meeting! The vodka shots are served in little welly-shaped shot glasses and the jellies are watermelon-shaped slices. They are my favourite! The mini Heritage burgers in a mini brioche bun (got to love a burger in a brioche bun), with pickle cucumber and confit of cherry tomato, to be served with a mini JD & coke shot are very yummy too and a nice substantial canape. Cocktail sausages are a traditional winner at any canape party and the new pork and apple cocktail sausage glazed with Heritage Venues honey and paired with Apple Pimm’s, secured it as a firm favourite. Delicious. Everyone loves a G&T on a summers day, and why not pair it with beetroot salmon gravlax on an avocado blini! It works a treat and was so delicious I had to go back for seconds! Even Fiona, who doesn’t usually like blinis, loved it! The battered king prawn lollipops, to be paired with a Bloody Mary, complete with a little celery stick were fab too and are a lighter choice for those after more of a traditional canape pairing. All in all, the kitchen have done an amazing job and these fun new canape options have such a great wow factor for any occasion – team meetings included!

Alys Hilbourne - Blogger & Events Manager

Having worked in London for most of her career, Alys discovered & fell in love with Lillibrooke Manor in 2012 and has never looked back, delivering hundreds of events and ensuring that each one is special and perfect in every way

Time to be Inspired

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Time to be Inspired

This week we held one of our marvellous tasting evenings at Lillibrooke Manor, giving us a chance to showcase our venue, staff, ambiance and atmosphere and to allow couples who have booked with us to sample some of the delicious dishes our chefs whip up. It’s a great opportunity for couples to come and get an idea of how their wedding will feel, with buzzing spaces full of excited guests!

We invite couples to come along to one of our complimentary tasting events once their booking is confirmed. On these lovely evenings, couples can sample a selection of our fantastic food and wines (our fab wine supplier, James from Woods Wines, comes to help guests taste wines from our different packages and to give advice about which may suit each dish best). The evenings are designed to allow couples to experience the excitement of a Lillibrooke Manor wedding in full swing, and to get a real taste of how things will be set up and run on their day.

Arriving to a canape reception, much as wedding guests will when they arrive, there is the chance to chat to some of our preferred suppliers, venue staff and to other couples getting married at a similar time, giving a lovely opportunity to chat with other couples about plans for their day and to share ideas – we try to invite people with weddings in similar seasons to each tasting, so that they can have a good chat and maybe glean a few extra ideas to give days that final sparkle!

The events have a full team of waiting staff and an Event Manager, giving a good impression of how a typical wedding would be run, along with the Sales Team and the Events & Ops team who mingle to chat to guests and answer any questions. The chefs also pop out after the food has been served and are happy to answer any questions and give advice about creating any dishes, which all helps with future planning.

Our wonderful preferred suppliers display samples of their work, providing inspiration and ideas. Academy Audio with their beautiful fairy light canopy giving the Great Barn that extra wow factor, stunning floral displays on the tables from FSO, yummy cakey treats from Sugar Designs (luckily there were lots of samples left, so we’ve been eating cake in the office ever since!), a very cool Ford Mustang from Always Chauffeur, a fun photo booth from Lucy Booths and Hannah McClune wandering around taking beautiful photos of the evening.

Our tasting evenings are created to give couples the opportunity to experience the event spaces when they are full of guests, very much like they will be at a wedding. It is a chance to see the events team and all the waiting staff in action. They give an impression of the quality and presentation of the dishes on offer and an idea of how we serve and attend to guests needs and requirements. It might not be the exact menu that couples hope to have on their day, but the evenings give a great impression of the overall atmosphere and how things will feel on a wedding day, and maybe even give some inspiration for menu choices and decoration they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise!

Alys Hilbourne - Blogger & Events Manager

Having worked in London for most of her career, Alys discovered & fell in love with Lillibrooke Manor in 2012 and has never looked back, delivering hundreds of events and ensuring that each one is special and perfect in every way

Cheese Tower Wedding Cake

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Cheese Tower Wedding Cake

Cheese towers have become increasingly popular over the last few years. Whether they’re to be used as a replacement for a traditional wedding cake, an after-dinner cheese course for those who don’t fancy a sweet dessert, or a late evening snack to help soak up the alcohol, these savoury delights can be just as beautiful as a traditional iced wedding cake. With the many different colours of the cheeses – deep oranges, chalky whites, beautiful blues and bright yellows – set against reds and greens of fruit and celery sticks, it is a striking addition to any buffet.

With a fairly strong move away from traditional fruit cakes over recent years, we’ve been finding that the cheese wedding cake has been making more and more of an appearance, and along with being as fabulously colourful as you wish to make them, they can also provide a tasty late night top-up for those feeling a bit peckish after a bit of dancing!

With the increased desire for these beautiful cheese cakes, we thought we might as well start to create them ourselves, so we put our thinking caps on to create the most delicious and stunning options for it. We’ve created three, four and five tier options and you can choose the tastiest cheeses, depending on what your taste buds are lusting over! These beautiful creations are draped with colourful grapes, figs, various seasonal fruits, they can be as colourful and flamboyant as you like – usually topped off with a cute heart-shaped truckle. We also boast to be able compliment any cheese choice perfectly with Lillibrooke orchard chutney, made using the apples from our own apple trees. Delicious stuff.

So, for a beautifully different wedding cake which doubles up as a mouth-watering evening buffet, why not explore our new cheese cake options!

Alys Hilbourne - Blogger & Events Manager

Having worked in London for most of her career, Alys discovered & fell in love with Lillibrooke Manor in 2012 and has never looked back, delivering hundreds of events and ensuring that each one is special and perfect in every way

Wedding Fair Extravaganza!

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Time to be Inspired

Lillibrooke’s second ever wedding fair, held last Sunday, was a brilliant way to kick off the year! It was a roaring success – with 35 exhibitors all showing off their best wares, Lillibrooke was packed with beautiful brides from all over Berkshire and the surrounding areas. There was something for everyone – dresses, rings, photographers, venue decorators, DJ’s, hay bales, cakes, magicians, flowers, fireworks, photo booths, even a toast master, fully decked out in all his finery, to welcome guests in from the cold! Anything you could possibly wish to have at your wedding, was at our wedding fair. The wonderful ladies at Berkshire Wedding Fairs had arranged it and, as ever, did a great job. We had almost 100 brides through the door during the day, some accompanied by a full family group, some as a couple and a great time was had by all.

A wedding fair is a fantastic place to start your wedding planning. Whether you’re at the very beginning of the process and looking for inspiration, or your planning is closer to completion and you’re simply looking for those special final touches to make your day perfect, exhibitors work hard to create an inspirational display and each will be styled differently. It’s also a great opportunity to speak to suppliers and get no-strings ideas and info to help with your planning. It’s a creative environment for you to draw inspiration for your very own day, pick and choose the things that you like and have a chat to the exhibitors.

Meeting potential suppliers face to face at a fair is so much more personal than simply looking at a website. All the suppliers who were at our fair really seemed to love being there, meeting the people they may work with over the coming year or so and sharing ideas and stories with other stall-holders.

The atmosphere was buzzing, helped along nicely by the prosecco we were serving from the bar – plus food for thought was well and truly provided by our chefs in the shape of tasty stone-baked pizzas. The circulating pizza slices were enough to draw people outside even on this chilly day, so I predict lots of pizza parlour evening buffets coming up!

Whether you’re treating a wedding fair as a fun day out, an excuse to sip some prosecco or nibble on tasty pizza, having a giggle with your girl friends or having a more serious browse with your fiancée, it’s a great place to get ideas, book suppliers or visit a possible venue. We have another one coming up on 22nd October, so feel free to pop along to see what we and our suppliers have to offer!

Alys Hilbourne - Blogger & Events Manager

Having worked in London for most of her career, Alys discovered & fell in love with Lillibrooke Manor in 2012 and has never looked back, delivering hundreds of events and ensuring that each one is special and perfect in every way

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Natasha September 2018

'We really did get lucky when we found our dream wedding venue in Lillibrooke Manor. I don’t think we could have asked for a more perfect venue, more attentive staff and more gorgeous backdrop. There are so many little spots around the venue for great photos and the Great Barn was big enough for all your guests to be in one place. We knew from the moment we saw it, it was going to be the place that we held the most important day of our lives so far in.'